Not the calculated stillness he usually wore like armor—the careful composure of a boy who had learned to hide every weakness from predators who circled constantly, waiting for the slightest flicker of vulnerability.

"It’s—" He stopped. Tried again. "It’s—"

Bloodlines that devoured one another. Children who died screaming as their own heritage ripped them apart from the inside out. Generations of meticulous breeding engineered to safeguard supernatural dynasties that had ruled from the shadows since before history was written.

Roxanne shook her head slowly. Her hair swayed with the motion, catching the frost-light that gleamed off the Void-Ice shroud still sealing them in crystalline isolation. Her voluptuous frame trembled beneath the champagne silk of her robe—not from cold, but from the crushing weight of secrets she had carried for two decades, secrets that now demanded to be released.

She drew a steadying breath of the pure terror coiled deep in her marrow.

Her hands twisted in her lap, knuckles bleaching white against the silk pooled around her trembling thighs.

She met his eyes and held them with the desperate intensity of a woman finally unburdening a truth that had been crushing her for years.

Phei’s mind raced, threading connections he hadn’t known existed.

She leaned forward. Her lush curves shifted beneath the champagne silk, the shadowed valley between her breasts catching the frost-light as she closed the distance between them.

Understanding bloomed cold and sharp in Phei’s chest, like frost flowers spreading across glass.

They were not merely the next link in ancient chains of succession.

"When the Destined Day comes," he said slowly, testing the shape of the revelation against everything he already knew, "the entire families will awaken their powers. Their bloodlines. The dormant heritage that’s been accumulating for generations."

"But the heirs of this generation—the last generation born when the Destined Day is destined to be happening... when these kids awaken—they won’t just receive the same powers as everyone else from their families. They’ll be..." He searched for the word. "More purer and stronger. Three times stronger. Five times. The most potent concentrated, strongest of their bloodline that has ever existed. And that gap would only widen as they go on."

Phei now understood why the intermarriage ban had been absolute for this generation.

And in a world transformed by the Destined Day—where every Legacy would awaken into a supernatural force—losing your strongest heir to another bloodline meant being consumed by the families who had kept theirs.

No wonder every patriarch of the previous generation had married outside Paradise. No wonder they had chosen non-Legacy spouses with the cold precision of generals selecting battlegrounds.

It was survival. Pure, brutal, and absolute.

The girls.

The sole daughters. The only children. The princesses born alone into families that had prayed for sons and received instead a single fragile vessel to carry every last hope.

But he still could not see what would kill them.

What am I missing?

"I can see you’re still confused."

She straightened on the edge of Sierra’s bed. Her voluptuous frame drew taut beneath the champagne silk, her trembling stilled by the sheer force of will it took to speak what came next.

"Let me explain about the real meaning of Legacy families."

"Let me tell you why these families cannot afford female last-generation heirs."